Sunday 3 October 2004 20.16 EDT
First published on Sunday 3 October 2004 20.16 EDT

Stephen Lambert, the king of factual entertainment, finds it hard to sit down for long. But he's especially on edge now because he and his company are joining a tiny elite band of British television producers. Lambert and his indy RDF seem to have a major American network hit on their hands for the first time with a US version of Wife Swap on ABC. If so it's a life changing - if not life swapping - moment.

Last Wednesday's US premiere attracted 11.1 million viewers, improving on a sneak preview the previous Sunday of 10.9 million. It had a virtual tie with the veteran Law & Order in the one demographic that matters, 18-49 year olds, and won the battle for 18-34 year old women. It is also a glorious riposte to Fox TV, which rushed out a derivative version called Trading Spouses this summer.

In six years as the director of programmes, Lambert, 45, a classically-trained BBC documentary maker, has helped drive RDF to become the UK's second largest independent producer. It was the Birtist regime and the introduction of producer choice that finally drove him out to entrepreneurial fortune and RDF now has a £53m turnover - its offices in West Kensington vie in scale with Channel 4's.

This week he's back in LA to find out if ABC is going to bump up the Wife Swap order from 20 to 30 shows. He describes how he came up with the idea - first screened on Channel 4 in 2003 - at an RDF ideas meeting.

"We were looking at things like an article in the Daily Mail about how a nurse on £15,000 lived, compared with a barrister on £200,000. What about them swapping lives, then what about a wife swap? ... no we couldn't do it. Then we thought hang on, there are separate bedrooms. We embarked on it.

"So many of our shows are commissioned on no more than an idea. All the detail that makes them work comes from getting under way and from the talented people who are thinking about it all the time. You evolve the format while making the first episodes.

"One of our frustrations is that some commissioners want all that to be worked out before you embark, and you almost lose the will to live."

Lambert is dismissive of the John Humphrys argument that reality television is debasing society. "How proud I'd have been as a documentary maker, say working on Modern Times [his last BBC2 series], if I had captured young men talking to each other frankly about sex. It is true, perfectly valid.

"I don't mind being bracketed with Big Brother. There are good and bad examples, good dramas, good news programmes, bad reality, bad dramas, bad news. As a genre, reality television is one way of telling us stories about human nature and in many ways it is often more honest than observational documentary."

That's a dig at Paul Watson who claims to have invented people programmes, and last week, in a Daily Mail article, attacked reality television, including Wife Swap, as having "nothing at all to do with reality".

Why? "Because it says at the outset this is a construct. It is only happening because we've arranged it, but look how people's nature is revealed because of the situation we've put them in. A lot of observational documentary implicitly pretends this is how it is and we have merely observed it when very often the director and people making the programme have manipulated things in order to be able to film something interesting."

Examples? "You tend to hide that if you are the person making it. We've had a lot of fantastic documentary directors working on things like Faking It and Wife Swap and they come to make the shows because they feel they can use all their documentary skills, and because they are guaranteed a beginning, middle and end. They are formats that give you those narrative structures, but still there's an enormous variety and unpredictability about what will happen in them.

"The frustration of making observational documentaries is that it is very hard to find situations in the real world that have a beginning, middle and end, and if they do it is very hard to be there for all the key moments. Obviously there have been fantastic observational documentaries but it is very hard to pull off."

What's been so difficult making Wife Swap in America - Lambert is one of three executive producers - is that it's very hard to find observational documentary makers there who are also capable of making popular television. "We're using a mixture of British documentary directors and American production talent. We're making it, and we edit it here, in London. I wanted to be on top of it.

"In America the broadcasters never had observational documentaries, unlike in Britain. The US is split between East Coast news divisions, reporter driven, with no interest in capturing natural dialogue, and the West Coast where there is scripted TV, drama and comedy. Until recently there was this little department at the end of the corridor called alternative programming, to do Bob Hope tributes and awards ceremonies. Then, five years ago, ABC and CBS's alternative departments commissioned Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? and Survivor."

But the American networks have tended to go for shows in artificial environments which are heavily produced and very carefully plotted.

Lambert says: "There's not a great emphasis on spontaneity and authenticity. That's why Wife Swap is so unusual. It is in real people's homes. None of the US commissioning people would order a docusoap just following characters, there's not enough guaranteed at the outset, but they looked at Wife Swap and saw there was enough of a format to guarantee emotion, drama, all the rest of it."

The UK version of Wife Swap, which returns on October 17, has been influenced by the US version, which runs for 43 minutes compared with C4's 48, and is broken up into seven acts around six commercial breaks.

"The last act is only two minutes. What they asked us to do is what's happened since the end of filming, six weeks later. When we showed them to Channel 4 they said we want them in our British show. It's amazing that now I go back to watching the British ones and I think, oh it's so slow, why isn't there more music?"

It is also due to bigger budgets - the British version costs less than £150,000, and the American version costs $750,000. Lambert says that the background checks, blood tests and psychological analysis are incredibly rigorous, as are the massive legal contracts signed by contributors. "You have to wonder if the process will get tougher as people wise up. They have no right to prevent transmission, if people start playing up to camera you stop it."

Lambert and RDF's chief executive David Frank face an interesting strategic decision over whether to diversify. "We think that it makes more commercial sense to concentrate on the area we do best, principally factual entertainment. I see no evidence that it is running out of steam."